In recent months the Bitcoin development community has faced difficultdiscussions of how to safely improve the scalability and decentralizednature of the Bitcoin network. To aid the technical consensus buildingprocess we are organizing a pair of workshops to collect technicalcriteria, present proposals and evaluate technical materials and data withacademic discipline and analysis that fully considers the complex tradeoffsbetween decentralization, utility, security and operational realities. Thismay be considered as similar in intent and process to the NIST-SHA3 designprocess where performance and security were in a tradeoff for a securitycritical application.

Since Bitcoin is a P2P currency with many stakeholders, it is important tocollect requirements as broadly as possible, and through the processenhance everyone’s understanding of the technical properties of Bitcoin tohelp foster an inclusive, transparent, and informed process.

Those with technical interest are invited to participate in this pair ofworkshops with the following intent:

Phase 1: Scene setting, evaluation criteria, and tradeoff analysis.

Montreal, Canada: September 12th-13th, 2015

Scalability is not a single parameter; there are many opportunities to makethe Bitcoin protocol more efficient and better able to service the needs ofits growing userbase. Each approach to further scaling the Bitcoinblockchain involves implicit trade offs of desired properties of the wholesystem. As a community we need to raise awareness of the complex and subtleissues involved, facilitate deeper research and testing of existingproposals, and motivate future work in this area.

The purpose of this workshop is to discuss the general tradeoffs andrequirements of any proposal to scale Bitcoin beyond its present limits.Session topics are to include the presentation of experimental datarelating to known bottlenecks of Bitcoin’s continued growth and analysis ofimplicit tradeoffs involved in general strategies for enabling futuregrowth.

This event will not host sessions on the topic of any specific proposalsinvolving changes to the Bitcoin protocol. Such proposals would be thetopic of a 2nd, follow-on Phase 2 workshop described below; this event isintended to “set the stage” for work on and evaluation of specificproposals in the time between the workshops.

Phase 2 will be planned out further as part of Phase 1 with input from theparticipants.

Hopefully to be easier for the Chinese miners to attend, the secondworkshop pertaining to actual block size proposals is to be planned forHong Kong roughly in the late November to December timeframe.

The purpose of this workshop is to present and review actual proposals forscaling Bitcoin against the requirements gathered in Phase 1. Multiplecompeting proposals will be presented, with experimental data, and comparedagainst each other. The goal is to raise awareness of scalability issuesand build a pathway toward consensus for increasing Bitcoin’s transactionprocessing capacity or, barring that, identify key areas of furtherrequired research and next steps for moving forward.

Preliminarily, Phase 2 will be a time to share results from experimentsperformed as a result of Phase 1 and an opportunity to discuss newdevelopments.

How do the Workshops work?

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Both events will be live-streamed with remote participation facilitated via IRC for parallel online discussion and passing questions to the event. -

These workshops aim to facilitate the existing Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIP)[1] process. Most work will be done outside of the workshops in the intervening months. The workshops serve to be additive to the design and review process by raising awareness of diverse points of view, studies, simulations, and proposals. -

Travel, venue details, and accommodation recommendation are available at scalingbitcoin.org. Registration begins August 12th at an early-bird ticket price of $150 USD until September 3rd. The ticket prices do not come close to covering the venue expense and travel subsidies, hence the need for corporate sponsors. -

There will be an application process for independent or academicresearchers to apply for travel assistance to help cover the expense ofairfare and hotel fees up to $1,000 per qualified presenter who intends togive a presentation. The four underwriters of this event have agreed tojointly review applications and cover the travel subsidies for qualifiedpresenters. See https://scalingbitcoin.org for details.

Sponsors of the Montreal Workshop

The first workshop is hosted and with logistics handled by the Montrealconsultancy CryptoMechanics <http://cryptomechanics.com>.

The Underwriters jointly responsible for venue expenses and researchertravel subsidies are currently the MIT Digital Currency Initiative,Chaincode Labs, Blockstream, and Chain.com.

If you have any research relevant to issues surrounding Bitcoinscalability, your proposal for a presentation at the Montreal workshopwould be most welcome. Please see https://scalingbitcoin.org for submissiondetails.